The Post Office Protocol (POP), commonly known in its third version as POP3, provides a way for electronic messaging programs such as Outlook (from Microsoft Corporation) and Thunderbird (from Mozilla.org) to interface with a central, remote message server. Oftentimes, a user may not have the messaging program up, running and connected to the central message server for number of reasons. POP provides a simple protocol for retrieving messages from the central message server so that the messages can be manipulated on the user's client computer without requiring continuous connection to the central message server.
Messaging programs such as Outlook and Thunderbird, however, must be configured to interact with the message server implementing POP. Typically a user is required to specify at least the following parameters in order to establish a valid POP connection: email address, password, user name, POP server name, and whether the POP server requires “secure password authentication”. Unfortunately, knowledge of the user's email address and password is not sufficient, and the other POP setup parameters cannot be simply guessed from the user's email address. For instance, different POP service providers use different naming conventions for naming their POP servers, and may also use different POP servers for different sets of users, thereby making it difficult to determine the POP server name if one knows the domain name portion of the user's email address but does not have access to the POP setup instructions provided by the POP service provider.
It would be desirable to provide assistance to users with one or more of these inputs as they configure a messaging program to interface with a POP server.